


(When I Awoke Today) Suddenly Nothing Happened

by telm_393



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, Hearing Voices, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-09 11:48:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20994323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Mike’s adjusting to life outside of Derry. Life with Bill, life with friends who remember him, life without Stan and Eddie...He’s adjusting.(But there are always bad nights.)





	(When I Awoke Today) Suddenly Nothing Happened

**Author's Note:**

> Just getting used to writing for this fandom! I love these characters and this ship so much. This is also a fill for a prompt on derrykink, the IT kink meme, which exists and is awesome.
> 
> This is the prompt: "As awful as Derry was, it's all Mike has ever known and leaving it causes emotional and mental health problems for Mike. Bill is there for him."  
https://derrykink.dreamwidth.org/1225.html?thread=61129#cmt61129
> 
> The title is from "Waiting for My Real Life to Begin" by Colin Hays, because I was really feeling it for this fic. 
> 
> There's a brief mention of Ben/Bev. 
> 
> There is canon-typical violence involving a lot of blood, but it's in the context of a hallucination.
> 
> Anyway, Mike's had a tough time, and you can tell by all the parentheses.

Mike is lying under a shapeless pile of rubble, alone except for endless darkness. He can’t move. Nothing happens, and then nothing keeps happening, and the moment stretches on and on in one long, uninterrupted take, and he wonders, _where am I? _and he thinks, _Eddie._

(They left Eddie there all alone. They left him because he was dead and there was nothing they could do and they had to get out of there, had to get Richie out of there. Richie, who fought the whole way.

Mike fought back because Richie deserved a life, and more than that Mike knew with everything in him that he couldn’t lose Richie too, not after Stan and Eddie, both of them so soon.

Mike only got to talk to Stan one last time, and all he did was break him.

Mike spent so many years away from Stan, and then he never even got to speak to him face-to-face, and that’s on him.

It’s on him, isn’t it?)

Mike thinks, again, _Eddie, _and that’s when he wakes up, comes to with gasps caught in his throat and sweat soaking his gray sweatpants and bare torso.

He’s lying in a luxuriously comfortable bed in a spacious room with a big window and moonlight is spilling through that window onto the dark brown hardwood floor and he is staring up at the rafters. They’re oak like the ones in the library, but better-preserved, or maybe just newer. Mike doesn’t know if he’s ever lived somewhere without rafters.

_Where are you now, Mikey? _he hears from somewhere behind him. He doesn’t turn to see who spoke, but it’s a pertinent question.

_Where are you now? Mike? _

He’s not in Derry.

Something shifts next to him, and Mike starts and then turns his head on his pillow to see Bill.

Right. Bill.

_Hi, Bill. _

When Mike left Derry, he swung by Ben and Bev’s place in Nebraska first. There, he caught up with the two of them and played with Ben’s dog. He pretended he hadn’t read or seen every interview they’d ever given, and he doesn’t think they suspected, and it didn’t matter anyway, that Mike was only able to have PR-approved versions of them for decades when they got him back in a matter of minutes.

What mattered was that they were there and they remembered him and were so happy to see him and it was so comfortable, it was like being home, and they were so happy with each other, and Mike was…

Mike was so _relieved, _he was just so goddamn relieved that he had them back.

(He has them all back. Except for Stan, except for Eddie.

Mike calls Stan’s phone just to hear his voicemail.

He tried to do that with Eddie too, but someone had already canceled his number.)

After Nebraska, Mike went right to Bill. Right to Bill and Richie, actually, because that was when Richie was crashing at Bill’s place while he tried to write his own material and stop losing his shit every five seconds and Bill tried to build a life without Audra in it.

Mike wasn’t surprised when he knocked on Bill’s door and Richie opened it, because they were close as kids, knew each other even before Mike knew them.

It must’ve been weird to remember that all of a sudden.

Mike wonders what it was like to remember. He never had the chance to forget, so he wouldn’t know.

Richie moved out after a while, got a new apartment for his new life, the one where he owned who he was and let himself try gay speed dating mostly so he could write a bit about the pitfalls of gay speed dating. The apartment he got was within walking distance of Bill’s place, but none of them mentioned it, even though Richie went to town on the jokes when Bill’s place became Bill and Mike’s place, because Richie left but Mike didn’t.

Mike didn’t leave, and now he’s in bed with Bill, which is normal, and he feels lost in spite of knowing exactly where he is, which is normal too, though he hasn’t mentioned that to Bill, just like he hasn’t mentioned the voice.

(Mike knows that Bill still doesn’t think he’s okay. He’s heard him chatting with Bev, with Ben, with Richie, seen him conference with the others when they come over. He’s heard his worry. Their worry.

And Mike still does things he knows don’t help him look sane, but it’s because he has to.

At least once a week he calls the others late at night, bile in his throat, his mind sparking and grinding and sure that everything he’s worked for is going to turn to ashes. He dials someone he loves and when they pick up he says, “It’s Mike.”

He waits for them to ask _who? _and instead they sigh and say, “I know.”

And everything’s fine, for a moment, because he is reassured that they remember him until next time he’s afraid they don’t, and then it starts all over again and Mike’s rushing into Bill’s office and asking the man he literally sleeps with _do you know who I am? _because he still can’t wrap his mind around a world where it isn’t a fact that the most important people in his life have no idea who the fuck he’s supposed to be.)

Bill wasn’t in bed when Mike turned in, because he’s just started a new book after knocking his last couple out of the park, but he must’ve come in at least an hour ago, because he’s actually at rest, and it always takes a while for him to get there.

His face is solemn in sleep and achingly familiar in the moonlight, and Mike’s eyes sting and his breath shakes and he tries to stay very quiet, sets his jaw to keep himself from making any noise. He doesn’t want to wake Bill.

Bill doesn’t sleep enough.

Mike probably doesn’t sleep enough either, but he never has, not since he was a little, little kid and wasn’t that roughly a million years ago?

(For twenty-seven years, Mike counted down every day. Now he’s not always sure when _now _is.

How long has it been since everything? Six months? A year? It’s been two bestsellers by William Denbrough since Mike left Derry for good, one Marsh fashion show, one Tozier Netflix special, a flurry of creativity.

And no, Mike has no idea what he’s doing.)

Mike’s stomach is churning. He feels sweaty and inert and he turns onto his side just to show himself that he can still move, with the added bonus of seeing better because Bill’s sleeping on his side too, so now they’re facing each other.

They’re facing each other and Mike is so glad that Bill’s alive and here with him.

Mike is lucky because everything he’s ever wanted has happened, except for the things that haven’t.

(No one was supposed to die. Everyone was supposed to die. Mike was supposed to die. He’d dreamed about what was next, but he never expected anything to come next, and he only realized that once _next_ came.

_I’m so sorry, _he said back then, waiting for Pennywise to finally finish him off. He thought he’d killed them all for nothing, that he’d wasted his whole life, and it took Bill tackling him out of the way to bring him back to earth.

Bill’s touch.

He’d wondered then if Bill remembered being young together, driving through town and singing to the radio. If he remembered the day before Bill left town and the moment they hugged for a long, long time and Mike felt Bill kiss the crook of his neck…

And later Mike pressed his forehead against Bill’s and wished he could kiss him, but there wasn’t enough time. Not enough time, not enough space. There are some spaces where it’s okay to kiss another man, and at that moment Mike had never set foot in one.

Mike didn’t ask, when they were kids, if Bill felt the same way he did, because he knew it wasn’t going to happen.

Mike still spent twenty-seven years hoping it’d happen, and then it did, and now it feels too good to be true.)

Mike is lucky and Bill’s alive and Mike is alive and Mike is free and he is happy and his happiness feels like panic. He can feel his own heart throbbing insistently inside of him, so hard it hurts, and then—

And then his heart is bursting out of his body, clawing its way out of his chest, cracking his ribs wide open and flopping onto the space between him and Bill, raw and bloody, and Mike stares dumbly as it writhes on the sheets, as it grows eight sharp little legs made of petrified veins and skitters right over to Bill and climbs up his still body to perch just above his hip.

The heart looks at Mike with big yellow eyes and smiles with sharp needle teeth, and Mike feels nothing but a hollow shock.

Mike blinks as a pool of blood slowly spreads under him and seeps into the sheets and makes stains that won’t come out.

(Stains that don’t exist won’t ever come out.)

The heart is still wet with Mike’s blood, and Mike bites the inside of his cheek hard as he watches his own blood run down Bill’s white t-shirt, sticking it to his skin, and it’s so nonsensical, especially outside of Derry—_there is no outside of Derry, you don’t ever really leave Derry, did you think you left Derry, Mikey? Madman?—_that Mike doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.

Mike’s heart is smiling at him and Mike, light-headed and feeling somewhere between “scared shitless” and “absurdly unafraid,” smiles back and whispers, like he’s sharing a secret, “This isn’t real.”

_Let’s interrogate that statement, _the voice says, apparently feeling particularly snooty, and so Mike does.

Other than the fact that whatever’s going on right now isn’t real, there is one thing Mike knows without a doubt: It is dead. Mike would never have been able to leave Derry if It wasn’t. Mike doubts most things most of the time, but he doesn’t doubt that. It is dead. It is dead, and that’s a relief because It’s death is always a relief, but it’s also a little bit of a concern because none of this should be happening.

…Then again, haven’t things like this been happening for a long time?

_Good job, Mike, _the voice praises, and it’s so condescending that Mike would punch it were it not disembodied. _This has, in fact, happened before. It happened last fucking month. You’re a madman. It’s Pennywise’s fault, but it’s not _all_ Pennywise’s fault. You know what I mean._

“This isn’t real,” Mike says again, and now he sounds on edge, his voice cracking, and he’s shaking, he can feel himself shaking, because it’s not real and yet. And yet.

(He could’ve woken the dead the first time it happened after Pennywise died, but Richie and Bill both ran into his room and they didn’t see a damn thing and Mike figured out that the safest thing was staying silent.)

Mike’s always thought of himself as steady, steady hands steady heart steady mind, but steady is something he’s never been.

Mike’s a liar.

_Aren’t you?_

(The voice, at least, is a constant. It is call-center calm. It sprang from the ether and began to chatter at him twenty years ago, and it only bothers him sometimes. Less now that he knows it’s not It infecting his mind, though he thinks that that ought to make it bother him more.)

Mike says, again, “This isn’t real.”

He says it plaintively, staring his heart down, willing it to disappear, and—

“Mike?” Bill asks, and Mike’s gaze snaps over to his face, which is creased with concern. His mussed auburn hair is shining in the moonlight, and Mike wants to touch it but can’t seem to move. “W-what’s…?”

Mike’s eyes drift back down Bill’s body, back to the heart, which is somehow still there, exactly where it shouldn’t be.

(Mike, on the other hand, is exactly where he should be, isn’t he?

He’s asking too many questions. There are still so many questions, possibly more than there used to be, and it frustrates him because the questions were supposed to end by now.

Weren’t they?)

“Hey!” Bill says, propping himself up on his elbow. “_Look _at me.” He says _look _with the strange emphasis he uses when he’s trying not to stutter, and Mike feels a pang of guilt. Bill’s stutter was better when Mike wasn’t here.

Mike looks at Bill.

It’s easy to do what Bill says. It’s always been.

Mike holds his breath, waiting for Bill to notice what’s wrong, but of course Bill doesn’t, because what’s wrong is that Mike’s heart isn’t in his chest right now, and Bill can’t see that. He would be able to if it were Pennywise, but it’s not, so Bill can’t see the hole in Mike’s chest. If he did, he would probably scream, and Mike would probably tell him not to worry so much because it doesn't even hurt, which is true, it doesn’t, it just feels hollow, and Bill would probably keep screaming. Maybe after a while Mike would start screaming too, just like old times, and then they’d both be freaking the fuck out and it would be a bonding experience, a repeat of the Jade of the Orient.

But no, it’s just Mike. It’s just Mike. He’s alone in this.

Mike can feel panic mounting in his recently-hollowed chest and blocking his airway and Mike spent so many nights like this, lying awake and trying to ignore what he told himself was just Derry playing with him even though he knew it wasn’t. So many nights yelling at the voice to shut the fuck up before he finally gave in and befriended it.

Mike spent so much time trying to defend himself from nothing, walking the streets of Derry ready and willing to fight the first shadow that looked at him funny.

Mike _lost_ so much time, but at least he knows it meant something and he knew it then too, but now nothing means anything. Before, if Mike got too worked up, he could go and do some research, go and work towards his ultimate goal. Now he’s not sure what the goal is.

Mike doesn’t know how to say any of that.

Bill’s eyebrows furrow in concern, and his voice is soft and kind next time he says, “Mike? Hey.”

One of Mike’s hands is twitching on the sheets between them, and Bill puts his own hand over it, gentle but not tentative. “What h-happened?” Bill asks, and Mike feels his face crumple.

“Mikey,” Bill says, voice gentle as he moves towards Mike and wraps himself around him, puts his forehead on Mike’s shoulder and tells him to hush. “It’s g-g-g…it’ll be okay.”

Mike’s finally able to muster up the energy for a burst of motion so that he can bury his face in the crook of Bill’s neck. He’s crying again, bitter tears he’s probably let fall too many times even though he could swear he was never a crier. Bill’s gonna get tired of him.

“It won’t stop,” Mike says into Bill’s shirt, and he keeps his eyes shut tightly. He’s lying right in the wet spot the blood left, probably, but he doesn’t feel any wetness. There’s no lump on Bill’s hip, no slick mass squishing against the sheets or crawling onto Mike’s own body, but Mike doesn’t know if it’ll still be there if he looks up, so he keeps himself in the dark, keeps himself safe against Bill.

_Turn light into dark, _the voice sing-songs, and Mike says, too loudly, “Shut up!”

_My bad, _the voice responds, and then it’s gone, but not before Bill murmurs, “…I didn’t say anything.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Mike says, and Bill hums.

“Okay,” he whispers, “okay, you’ll be okay. W-w-what _happened, _Mikey?”

“I just woke up,” Mike says, and the words are useless against everything he feels. “That’s all, I just…I’m here.”

It doesn’t make any sense, but Bill doesn’t seem to mind. He hums and whispers sweet nothings until Mike starts to drift away, wipes away Mike’s tears as though he doesn’t care that Mike woke him up with his raving yet again.

(Some nights, Bill screams and fights and Mike has to hold him down, so who knows? Maybe Bill prefers this.)

Mike goes back to sleep. He doesn’t dream about anything.

When he wakes up, it’s morning and the room is full of sunlight and his heart is back in his chest and Bill is still holding him and there are several other things that are true.

_It_ is gone forever.

Mike’s not in Derry anymore.

Mike is finally living his own life now with people he loves.

And everything is better than it used to be.

(Later, Mike will overhear Bill in his office talking to Beverly on the phone about what happened, and Bill will say, at some point, probably at more than one point, “He’s still adjusting.”

Someday, Mike will be done adjusting.

Someday, in good time.) 


End file.
